#hey theologian

[oldfritz]

things religious people have told me after my dad’s death that’s comforting: “may his memory be a blessing” (wonderful, beautiful, touching; thank you to all his jewish friends/friends who were like family, it is and always will be I’m getting verklempt typing this)

things religious people have told me after my dad’s death that aren’t comforting: “it’s part of god’s plan” (awful atrocious insensitive; while an almost 70yr old man dying of a heart attack isn’t the greatest tragedy in the world there are greater ones and your god plans those too? christian god not one worth worshipping and He will one day face my wrath but you will first. idiot)

[unproduciblesmackdown]

another win for the (partial) pentiment playthrough i happen to be watching now is they chose rapscallion, cheered when that happened....never before actually seen someone's playthrough involve (a) failing the baron's vibe check (even only by a little) or (b) Achieving martin's approval or (c) actually headbutting werner

[neil-gaiman]

Hey Neil, I had Good Omens S1 on yesterday for noise while I was doing work, and I remembered that there's been debates over of it was really an apple that Eve picked, or if it was a pomegranate or some other fruit. Did y'all choose to keep it an apple to have it universal? What was the decision on that for the show?

The bible only talks about the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Nothing about what kind of fruit it was apart from that. It might have been (according to various theologians) a fig, a grape, a pomegranate, wheat, a psychoactive mushroom, even a banana. The apple theory is based on a Latin pun, according to some scholars, and according to one book I read long ago but cannot find with a google search, was pushed by the Church of Rome trying to get the Irish and British Churches back under their control as they were using cider as their communion wine.

(More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_fruit)

Fortunately, Terry and I were not called on to solve this problem. We were writing a funny book, and were thus able to do lots of jokes about eating apples, and didn't need to do and explain the banana jokes.

[untamedeventuality]

tbh I think the funniest possible option (and my personal head canon so I can have characters say “Jesus Christ” as a swear) is that Jesus was the first person to ever have Arceus on his team

Does Jesus exist in the Pokemon universe, and what Pokemon does he have on his team?

[blessedarethebinarybreakers]

I’m a transfem Christian, and sometimes I worry that I’m twisting Christianity to suit my politics and views rather than the reverse. I was raised as a Southern Baptist and left for the Episcopal Church, with the conservatism of the former church being a large reason for my departure. I really don’t want to have to chose between either being able to transition and being a good Christian, but I’m so worried that I’ll have to make that choice.

Hey there, I am so sorry for the delay in responding to this. I don't for a second believe you are "twisting" Christianity to suit your views by living into your true self:

Jesus tells us that we can know a thing by its fruit — if the fruit is good, the tree is good; if the fruit is bad, the tree is bad (Luke 6:43-45; Matthew 7:15-20).

What are the fruits of transition? Joy, community, reconnection with your own body? Life?

What are the fruits of the things preached by ultra conservative churches? Hatred, fear of difference, violence? Deportation instead of love of stranger, judgment instead of mercy, control via terror instead of liberation through God's love?

Near the end of this webpage of mine about a liberatory framework for reading scripture, I address the accusation that queer Christians are just "reading into" the Bible what we want to see. To sum it up, I agree that all people bring our biases to the text — heck, the biblical authors brought their own biases to the text!

“The truth is, you can bend Scripture to say just about anything you want it to say. You can bend it until it breaks. For those who count the Bible as sacred, interpretation is not a matter of whether to pick and choose, but how to pick and choose. We’re all selective. We all wrestle with how to interpret and apply the Bible in our lives. We all go to the text looking for something, and we all have a tendency to find it." - Rachel Held Evans

Many theologians say that when we accept both our own biases and the biases of the people who wrote, edited, and compiled the books of the Bible, the best way to determine what is Divine in scripture is to follow The Rule of Love:

"Any interpretation of scripture is wrong that shows indifference or contempt for any individual or group inside or outside the church. All right interpretations reflect the love of God...for all kinds of people everywhere, everyone included and no one excluded.”

- Shirley Guthrie

The webpage offers more details about this way of reading the Bible, if you are interested. But at the end of the day, the main thing I hope you can come to believe not only in your head but in your heart and your body is that you are beloved. That God created you exactly as you are with purpose and delight. That you have vital gifts to share with the world that the Body of Christ is not whole without.

If you need further assurance through theology, I invite you to check out Austen Hartke's Transgender and Christian YouTube series.

You may also find Rev. Nicole Garcia's story encouraging; she's a trans pastor who once said that she has experienced two vocations in life: one to ordained ministry, and one to being a woman.

God is calling you, too. I pray that you can feel Their presence and love in your life -- even when it's hard to believe in it yourself. <3

(For more, I have a trans tag and an affirmation tag and trans women tag and also an FAQ you might like to peruse through)

[eisforeidolon]

Jared: Thank y'all for bringing us out here, sorry we're all -

Audience person: THANK YOU!

Jared: Fuckin' A, thank you. Stoked to be out here, stoked to see you guys, stoked to see this family. Get reacquainted with some old friends and familiar faces and meet some new friends.

Jensen: You know what the capital here is?

Jared: Uhhh, uhhhh, what was - yeah! Old Hampshire?

Jensen: [laughing] I didn't set you up very well.

Jared: [hits Jensen's arm, laughing] We used to do that on set.

Jensen: We used to do the capital game - [lights suddenly turn up] Oh! And let there be light.

Jared: So is it the seventh day? I guess it is! [to audience laughter] Thank you. I'm a theologian -

Jensen: [waving] Hey everybody, there's some faces. Well, thank you for having us out here, and apologies to a few of you yesterday. I was, uh, I was a little tired.

Jared: I couldn't tell.

Jensen: [scoffs]

Jared: Couldn't tell! [?]

Jensen: Not by design, I ended up filming all night in Los Angeles on Friday night and I came straight here after I wrapped, so. It was very little sleep and they helped me out with arranging the schedule to be a little, a little nicer. But thanks for sticking around, thanks for making it to Sunday with us, we're happy to be here, happy you're here.

[a-queer-seminarian]

Hello, sibling. Do you have resources for intersex Christians? Anything counts, trust. I'm an intersex Catholic and feel very alone in my community. I know God loves me and made me perfectly, but I would love to see fellow intersex Christians talking about our bodies, identities and faith. God bless you

Hey there. My heart goes out to you in your loneliness; you are beloved by God, and you are perfect as you are, even if human beings deny and erase you.

I am also sorry that the broader queer community also too often fails to remember intersex folk and include y'all in our efforts towards justice. You deserve solidarity, deserve to have your pain and your joys listened to as much as any of us.

And, I am happy to tell you that yes, I've got some intersex faith resources for you!

Let's start with intersex Christians talking about their experiences, and then we'll get to some intersex-resonant scripture.

...below the readmore.

Intersex Christians sharing their stories

Stories of Intersex and Faith — a documentary! I have not watched it yet because it costs $20 for an individual to rent it, but if you are interested but the cost is prohibitive, please let me know and I'm happy to rent it for you! .

"I'm an Intersex Christian — and It's Time the Church Listened to Me" (article, major trigger warning for discussion of medical abuse & trauma on a young child; to avoid it, you can skip to paragraph beginning: "The heart of the issue is that church still sees me as problematic...", after which are discussions of trouble with church but also suggestions for improvement) .

Interview with Sara Gillingham, author of the previous article (video, 51 minutes) .

And here's a Facebook video: "What do you wish more Christians knew about intersex people" (video, 2 minutes) .

Another FB video by the same person on how churches can be more supportive of intersex people (video, 3 minutes)

An intersex Catholic Saint?

If you haven't heard of Madre Juana de la Cruz, who would point to her pronounced adam's apple as proof that she had been "male in the womb," check her out!

Now let's check out some intersex-resonant Bible stories, plus intersex theology

For a concise, accessible look at intersex readings of various biblical figures, check out my webpage here... . as well as my webpage here for interpretations of Jesus himself as intersex (and trans)! (The intersex part is fairly brief, but includes links some scholarly essays if you want to learn more about intersex Jesus) . Please note that the focus of my site is trans theology (because that's my focus most of the time), but where a passage is also applicable to intersex folk I make sure to bring them in too, with links to further reading. For instance, did you know Abraham and Sarah were considered intersex by some rabbis in the Talmud?? .

"Male, Female, and Intersex in the image of God" with Lianne Simon and Megan DeFranza (video, 1.5 hours) — great intro to some intersex theology if reading isn't your thing

Intersex in Christ: Ambiguous Biology and the Gospel by Jennifer Anne Cox (book) .

"Intersexuality in Scripture” by Sally Gross (essay free online) . Note that this essay is from 1998 and the language used reflects that, but Gross is one of the foundational intersex theologians. . Also if you want to skip over all her intro paragraphs defining intersex, skip to the paragraph starting "As a brute physical phenomenon, the bodiliness of people who are born intersexed challenges cherished assumptions...")

Sex Difference in Christian Theology by Megan DeFranza (book)

_______

I hope some of those resources can help you feel a little less alone. There are other intersex Christians, including many who lead, write, preach!

I'll close with a regret: I was trying to find any kind of virtual community for intersex Christians, or even just intersex people in general. I wasn't able to find such a place.

If anyone knows of some online intersex support groups or communities, please share! Or if you have other intersex Christian resources you wanna add, share those as well.

I can suggest that you check out this webpage of intersex advocacy groups across the world. If there happens to be one by you and you get involved, I wouldn't be surprised if you met some other intersex Christians there.

Wishing you well, sibling. When you feel alone, may the intersex Christ enfold you in love. When you feel like "the only one," may the stories of faithful intersex people past and present bring you encouragement.

[corvidae-quills]

Veering slightly off track to zero in on your tag “also it feels like God needs the devil?” bc I think (maybe, idk) a lot of your issues may be stemming from here. I’m not sure if you mean that God needs the devil in the sense that He needs an Evil to fight to prove He’s Good? Or that God and the devil are somehow equal opposites, Manichaean/Gnostic style?

Bc the thing is in the first case, if God created evil in order to somehow prove He’s good, then you’d be right there would be MAJOR moral issues there, and in the second case then you’d be right in that He couldn’t be omnipotent. Neither of these is actually what the Church teaches though so I’m gonna veer off again into a (very brief) Who/What Exactly is God? tangent (if you’ve heard any of this before then sorry, plz don’t take offense, but I also went to Catholic school for 9 1/2 years and never learned literally any of this so I’m guessing you might not’ve either)

I’m mainly gonna use St. Thomas Aquinas’s argument from causation here which boils down to: Everything that exists is caused by something else. My cup is made from clay which is made from minerals which is made from (some weird geologic/tectonic/etc process I’m not a geologist bear with me) which only exist because the planet Earth exists, which was made out of elements, which were forged in the stars, which were made out of gases, which were made out of... something. But the point is: nothing that exists actually causes itself to be, but everything is caused by something. So eventually you reach a point where it’s necessary for something to be its own Cause, or else nothing would have existed in the first place. Which is where we run into God, the First Cause/Uncreated Is/the Great I AM.

(I’ve seen arguments where people say maybe our universe was caused by one that came before it, but that just kicks the ball down the road because now that universe had to come from somewhere)

So basically (from one angle) that’s what God is, Being itself. Every molecule and electron that exists is contingent on God and held in being by Him (omnipresence/omnipotence/omniscience all naturally flow from this.) The devil, meanwhile, is just a created being, and saying he is to God like an ant is to me would be basically meaningless, the gap is WAY WAY UNIMAGINABLY bigger. But the devil, like every rational being (including us humans) has free will, which in order to be completely free MUST include the ability to turn away from God. We’re not free if we don’t have the option to Say No.

So looping back around to evil - Catholicism teaches that there’s the Perfect will of God (God Himself directly wills a thing to happen or not) and the Permissive will of God (God permits things to happen through the free choices made by His creatures, and those choices can be evil.) The Problem of Evil isn’t really a Problem at all, since the possibility of evil is a necessary aspect of a truly free will - once again, if you can’t say no then you are not free.

But since God is Goodness itself, every choice that is a ‘no,’ which is moving away, is necessarily evil. When the devil rejected God, he chose evil. Love is good, so he doesn’t have any of it, he doesn’t want anything good for humanity or for you, he hates all of us and the only thing he wants for us is to be miserable forever. If the devil can be said to rule in hell, then it’s only in the sense that he’s the first and biggest prisoner.

(I read another post about this once that put it better than I did but I can’t for the life of me remember enough of it to find it so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The general point is the devil is NOT a cool rebel he’s actually a self-absorbed loser incel. Who hates you.)

And on the topic of hell: Basically, if someone wants something else more than they want God, then He won’t force them to give that thing up, because love that isn’t freely given isn’t love, and if you would force a person into staying with you then you wouldn’t really love them. (I was actually watching a video on the topic of hell - it’s like an hour + thirty minutes long so I understand if you don’t want to watch it - and the priest being interviewed sort of outlines this point by saying that the father in the parable of the prodigal son is not being unloving by failing to chain his son up so he can’t go ruin his life.)

Anyway this got long and might be slightly incoherent and possibly not helpful at all but! I hope it helps!

Thinking about how it was never made clear to me in Catholic school exactly WHY Jesus died for our sins. I just remembered that I was literally never clear on who the dying helped??

I've heard theories as an adult, but basically what I'm saying is pointless martyrdom seems a little pointless, and also with enough propaganda the big logical gaps in a belief system get really hard to see. Especially if questioning anything is blasphemy.

I would have gotten in so much trouble for insisting the teacher explain how Jesus helped us by being tortured to death by Romans even when God could have prevented it! God sent his only Son, they would have said! Be grateful, they'd say! Be guilty! Stop asking why he did that!!!

[magpiecollectingknowledge]

Hey all! Enjoy the beautiful photo of my dog being a silly boy. I’ve been drinking a lot of hot drinks as it’s getting colder in the UK. My blood will become tea some day.

My notes have been super pretty imo recently! I love digital notes so much. My semester starts this week so I’ll be showing off the fun I have making notes. I hope they can inspire you a lil to study, or at least make you want to learn something new!

The notes about are both for my theology and inter-religious encounter module. It’s mainly reading a bunch of classic texts from the patristic period (which was the early theologian era of Christianity when doctrines and heresies were being decided) by theologians like Augustine, who I think is equally insane and horrible in equal measure and love studying. Justice for his long time partner and mother of his child who he stole custody from and abandoned, and won’t even name in his works.

Have a good week everyone!

[storm-of-feathers]

Dude, crypto literally says that about religion all the time. They're an occultist not a theologian. What are you on about " doesn't hold water." If all that's supposed to be personal the who the fuck are you to dig at someone you don't agree with?

Hey @cryptotheism can you clear this up or??? Afaik we've never gotten into an argument and I'm really not sure what this is all about??????

[speckofvoid]

I'm neurodiverse with a special interest in marine life, going to an American Dominican college and studying the Bible. I am not religious, I was raised in a "non religious" household. I still went to religion once a week and such and was Christian for a small portion of my childhood.

What got me out of believing in Christianity?

I thought about the flood of Noah, none of the normal biodiversity everything coming from inbreeding questions, nu uh, I was six. What was the sticking point in my indoctrinated child brain?

Fish

WHY WERE THE FISH SPARED???? Are fish Biblically not animals? Would only freshwater fish survive? It would turn the world into an estuary because of the amount of freshwater being added, would only fish who could survive in those conditions be spared? Also why were the animals being punished for human sin? And again are fish not animals???? Nobody could answer my question and six year old me turned my back on Jesus because all of that is bullshit, fish are animals, and they had to be spared for a reason and if it was an oversight that's bullshit. I loved fish, I was on my way to be a marine biologist. Fish were my everything and if the Christian god didn't uphold fish and stand for fish I wanted nothing to do with them.

Now here I am! Grown up! Still not catholic for a lot more reasons than just fish. Going to a college with theologians who supposedly can answer every question you pose to them about the Bible. We are talking about the flood of Noah. I pose the question. "Hey why did the fish not get punished? Are they biblically not animals?" The room fell silent. I STILL DONT KNOW. Nobody can tell me why the fish got to survive. I know this is a silly sticking point against Christianity, especially during all of... America. I won't be converted to Christianity if anyone can tell me why the fish survived but it's just so weird.

[apenitentialprayer]

My dear friend,

Do you have any interesting Adam and Eve legends? I'm not talking about the apocryphal gospels in particular, because I know a little about them.

Hey there! Not sure when you sent this, hopefully you weren't waiting for too long. Ah, there's a lot of folklore that could be looked at.

For example, there's a theme in some Islamic and Jewish folklore that Adam and Eve actually separated for a length of time after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. This may have been a conscious choice on their part, or they may have been separated during their expulsion. In some versions, Eve is already pregnant with Cain at this time, and it is Eve's wails while giving birth that draws Adam back to her. In other versions, Eve may not yet be pregnant. In some accountings, the demon Lilith impregnates herself from Adam's wet dreams and produces a race of demons.

There's a story where Adam created by dust that angels had collected from all corners of the world, so that his creation is in some sense an epitome of all Creation. (The fact that he is created from dust from all over the world is also an etiological explanation for why there are so many different skin colors among humans).

There is a legend that Adam was buried under Golgotha; Christ's Precious Blood spilled onto and soaked into the ground where he was buried. You can see this motif in some Crucifixion icons that depict a human skull (Adam's skull) under the Cross.

The number of children that Adam and Eve have vary wildly by source; some Irish sources suggest 100 children, 50 of each sex; we have a surviving monks' trivia game that says that Adam and Eve had 63 children, 33 boys and 30 girls. The lowest number I know is 14 children total. These are all postlapsarian children, by the way; some theologians speculated that Adam and Eve may have had sinless children in the Garden of Eden, beings we now know as faeries.

Speaking of children, one Islamic tradition says that Eve always gave birth to twins; a boy and a girl, a future husband and wife. According to this story, Cain killed Abel because Cain wanted to marry Abel's twin sister and not his own.

More children stories! In one tale recorded by the Brothers Grimm, Adam and Eve had many, many children. When God came to bless them with vocations, Eve was ashamed at the ugliness of some of them, so she hid them away while presenting the beautiful ones. When she saw God bless them with destinies like becoming scholars, knights, and princes, she called the ugly ones out. By that point, all the cool vocations were handed out, so they got destinies like becoming peasants, tanners, and sailors. And that's why.... us commonfolk are ugly???

At least some Rabbinic sources attribute Psalm 92 to Adam and the angels.

Oh! And Adam and Eve may have brought plants from the Garden of Eden to our fallen world; it may be a particular tree in Kashmir, clover, or maybe wheat.

[roundearthsociety]

This is going to be a tad personal but how do you manage to be trans and catholic? Some of the biggest anti trans voices like Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles and Desantis base their views off that religion. Many trans people on here, Reddit and IRL have nothing but disdain for Catholicism because of the Vatican’s statements and how they’ve been treated. Likewise, a lot of Catholics I’ve seen on tumblr, Reddit and various forums view it as a sin, mental illness or pedophilia and oppose affirming care as well as IVF.

I’m an American exvangelical, who does have some conservative Catholic family members, and I’m trying to broaden my perspective a bit rather than writing Catholicism off as an irredeemable, hateful colonizer ideology and viewing paganism and Reform Judaism as the only valid religions like most Tumblr users do. How do you put up with it when many refuse to affirm it, including the pope who’s still very conservative? I’m not asking to attack your beliefs but are simply curious whether there’s more nuance than people will claim.

This is something that's a bit hard to answer, as someone who's not that good a theologian nor that good at theory. Plus, I'm not side A, so I wouldn't be all that good at discussing Catholicism While Queer with you I suspect. Anyway I will be assuming you, the reader, have got some level of legitimate Christian faith. Because otherwise I'm not sure how to like. Give you that.

So let me preface all of this by recommending you look into queer Catholic organizations such as New Ways Ministry, or especially DignityUSA which I've heard good things about. There are also some Tumblr bloggers on the more affirming side of things, most of them aren't really doing all that much advocacy work either but you might find it interesting to scroll through, idk, and-her-saints or shoutsofmybones's blogs for example, and take a look.

Also: you don't have to give up on Christianity entirely if you can't / would rather not be Catholic! Even if the specific ritual and community aspect is especially important to you, the Episcopal Church is probably decently well implanted where you live and is worth looking into, especially since it doesn't have the embedded political elements that the US Catholic Church tends to have.

As for my own personal answer below - please don't bother to get mad at me for this, it's like 4AM and I'm not too interested in writing a thesis here.

Gender-wise it's honestly pretty straightforward. I know I function better being generally recognized as another sex than I was assigned at birth, with characteristics to match; everything else in terms of gender roles names etc is really just getting a lil silly with it ngl. This is neither especially uncommon nor especially new, and the generally recognized way to deal with this has long been to just let people do their thing. While there are issues with the way that's being done (hey! you should freeze your gametes if that's available to you! don't count on never wanting kids, especially if you're a teenager! trust me on this one.), a lot of the modern discourse around it boils down to "this is disgusting to me so it must be morally wrong". And like, I'm a biologist, I can't really find it in myself to be grossed out by this stuff anymore.

Anyway the Church is far from a monolith. Even at the institutional level there's plenty of tolerance; my home diocese is based in a large and ancient Mediterranean city so God knows it's had ages to get used to the weird shit, not counting the handful of trad strongholds. My understanding of the situation in the US is that it's Kind Of Really Not That though, so I'd strongly recommend heavily looking into your local Catholic diocese and parishes before making any moves, because Catholic faith and practice are a very community-bound thing and it's not really something you can do at a distance. Thankfully though, once you start avoiding the political activists trying to use faith as a means to an end (as is the case for most of the people you cite in your ask), you'll find that it's relatively more chill than you'd think. Let me elaborate.

My own case is complicated enough that I can't reasonably apply any of the details to this, but ultimately what's important to note here is that Christianity is functionally about how everyone is flawed, and everyone fucks up, and sure you'll be forgiven but you've got to own up to it first. The members of the Church, even the Pope, even (most of) the Saints in their earthly lives, are no exception. They can be misguided, fearful, or just plain hateful; in such circumstances, it's on them to do better, not on you to adapt to their flaws, and they know this if they're honest to themselves. This, in turn, must apply just as much to you and me; as a Christian, you (generic) have everything you need to do better, and to know anything that prevents you from loving other people is probably not the way to go.

But anyway yeah. I'm trans and Catholic because both of those are just kinda who I am, and I don't intend to stop being either because I'm not interested in replacing myself with the cop in my head. So the Church can have fun with that.

[blessedarethebinarybreakers]

Not sure if this is the right place to ask this but I gotta start somewhere. I've been learning a lot about indigenous history and activism as I work on deconstruction, and a sentiment I come across a lot is bitterness towards Christianity. I cannot emphasize enough how much I fully understand. The rough bit is that sometimes when I read their work, I get the implication that there's nothing worth saving in the Church/Christianity- that to hold on to it is to hold on to all the colonialism and white supremacy and yuck.

As a disabled trans Christian, I get that, but it still hurts. I love God and am a Christian despite everything. I want to be an ally to indigenous people, but I want to follow God this way too. I know those aren't mutually exclusive, but it feels that way sometimes. Do you have any insight for me to find peace in this regard?

Thank you.

Hey there, thanks for the question, sorry for the delay!

This is something I've also wrestled with — a question I ask myself over and over, and probably always will. I cannot offer you peace, because as Jeremiah 6:14 says, "There is no peace!" — not while our faith continues to be wielded as a weapon against so many peoples. What I can offer you are some of the thoughts that have allowed me to continue to be Christian with hope that this faith can be better than what it's long been misused for, and the resolve to do my part to make it so.

First, that Christianity isn't unique in being co-opted by colonialist powers.

Any belief system can be twisted for violence, and many have been. If Christianity didn't exist, white supremacy still would — colonialist powers would have found a different belief system to twist into justifying their evils.

That absolutely does not absolve us from reckoning with the evils that have been done in Christianity's name! This isn't about shutting down critiques of Christianity with "uh well it could have been any religion" — as things played out, Christianity is the religion responsible for so much harm, and we need to acknowledge that and listen to groups who tell us how we can make some form of reparations.

But for me at least, there is some comfort in understanding that Christianity isn't, like, inherently evil or something. Recognizing that it isn't unique even in its flaws helps me look at the problem with clearer eyes, rather than wallowing in guilt and shame, if that makes sense.

Next, that there are Indigenous Christians, and Black Christians, and other Christians of color — that oppressed peoples have found things worth cultivating within Christianity! If they can find something worthwhile in this faith, it would be arrogance for me to deny it.

For instance, even when white slaveholders edited Bibles to remove too much discussion of liberation, even when white preachers emphasized verses about slaves being obedient to their masters, many enslaved people recognized how Christian faith actually affirms their equality and the holiness of their desire for liberation.

Black Theologian Howard Thurman opens his 1949 book Jesus and the Disinherited with a question asked to him by a Hindu man who knew the harms white Christianity had done to both their peoples: “How can you, a black man, be Christian?” The long and short of Thurman’s answer is that, in spite of the pain and exploitation too often inflicted by Christians in positions of power, the oppressed have always been able to see past that misuse of the Christian message to the true message lived out by Jesus Christ: a message of liberation for all.

For more thoughts on why and how to keep being Christian in spite, in spite, in spite...I invite you to look through my #why we stay tag.

___

How I wish that Christianity had never gotten tangled up in Empire! but it did, and it still is, and because for good or ill I cannot help that my spirit is stubbornly drawn towards the Triune understanding of the Divine, the best I can do is to use my privilege and what small influence I have within Christian institutions to move us towards decolonization. What some of that's looked like on the level of my personal beliefs:

I am firmly against any form of proselytizing. I don't support evangelism financially, I speak out against it, I don't platform it. (If someone wants to hear about my faith, they'll come to me — I don't run after them. And if someone does want to have that conversation, I aim to make it a dialogue, where we are learning from each other.)

I continuously work to recognize and uproot Christian supremacy within myself — the beliefs I didn't even realize where there until I started digging. That has included challenging any inkling within myself that Christianity is the "best" or "most right" religion. (One book that's helped a lot with that is Holy Envy by Barbara Brown Taylor.)

I seek wisdom from and relationship with Christians of color. Their insights are vital to our faith, and I try to use what small influence I have to uplift them.

On that last note, here are some resources I recommend as you continue to explore these questions:

This First Nations Version of the Christian Bible is gorgeously written, and a great way to explore scripture through a Native lens.

Native by Kaitlin B. Curtice is a lovely poetic memoir that explores how one person has sought to hold both her Christian faith and Potawatomi identity within herself. (She also has a new book out that I haven't read yet but really want to!)

God is Red: A Native View of Religion by Vine Deloria Jr.

Rescuing the Gospel from the Cowboys by Richard Twiss

I haven't read any of these 4 books but they look good too

This video with advice to non-Indigenous Christians

If anyone has any resources to add, please do!

[orthopunkfox]

No Girls Allowed: Why the All-Male Priesthood is Archaic and Stupid

I find the arguments of women/female ordination increasingly tiring. The theological arguments are incredibly shallow, revolving mostly around "Jesus chose only male apostles and the Church has always upheld the tradition." Even if I believe that Christ only chose male apostles "we've always done it this way" is hardly a sound piece of theology on which to build an entire clerical order.

But did Jesus choose only men? Let's look at the passage from the Gospel of Saint John which is commonly cited as Christ establishing the priesthood (or episcopate):

On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”

Saint John doesn't tell us specifically who was there (except that Thomas wasn't). He doesn't even specify that only the 12 were there. We do know however that Mary Madeleine had just spoken with Jesus that morning and had run back to the upper room to tell the disciples about the encounter. In fact, this passage begins with "on the evening of that day" because the passage immediately preceding details Saint Mary Magdalene's encounter with Christ and her returning to the upper room to tell them about it. Saint John doesn't give us the full account of the conversation but it's reasonable to assume that she didn't say "I have seen the Lord!" and the rest of the disciples responded "Really? Well good for you, Hey we're hungry. Can you run by Herod Burger and get us some food?" and then while she was gone, Jesus appeared. Or (even more far fetched) "Now Jesus knew that Mary Magdalene was there, but waited until she left so that He would only breathe on biological males to ensure an all-male priesthood."

It's therefore reasonable to assume that if all of Jesus's disciples were there hiding from the Jews, Mary Magdalene was there also since she had conversed with the disciples earlier that day. Therefore she was part of the receiving of the Holy Spirit. And when you have the title given to her of Equal to the Apostles as Saint Mary Magdalene is called in Holy Orthodoxy (along with at least 7 other women), the claim that Jesus chose only all male apostles becomes weaker.

And of course all of these theological arguments take place inside an assumed gender and biological binary, which we know does not exist. In fact, we don't know if all of the supposed male apostles in the room that day were 100% biologically male. Is it possible that some priest some time in history was intersex? Are intersex people allowed to be priests so long as they have a penis? Who's job is it to check? Where is it written "the candidate for ordination shall remove his pants before the bishop, and, upon verification that he is in possession of a penis, be allowed to the sacred order of priests." What if they have male chromosomes but not all-male anatomy? We're going to start seeing posters in parishes that read "Real Priests Have a Bulge!"

Of course I'm being a bit sarcastic here, but only to make a point on how ridiculous these arguments are! I have known many priests in my life, men and women and other, and have learned from and been cared for by all of them. In fact the only ones that ever made me uncomfortable were the men. Point of fact, Orthodox theologian and religious scholar David Bentley Hart remarked in an interview I saw recently that women by far statistically make better priests then men, and went on to half jokingly remark that he is at the point in his life where he is beginning to believe that the priesthood should be limited only to women.

So if the theological argument is so shallow and women are perfectly able to fulfill the duties of priestly vocation, why then do these arguments persist? The honest answer is "we've done it this way for 2000 years [allegedly]. Why stop now?" And indeed most mainline churches have no idea at all what to do with women. Even mainline Orthodoxy who reveres the Theotokos so fervently is still shaken by the ordination of a deaconess, an office which has existed for centuries yet has fallen out of practice in recent history and the negative reaction to its reinstatement in places where it's needed further reveal the reality of "we've always done it this way" being the true bone of contention.

In summary, hiding behind a facade of piety and theological tradition so that you can limit the priesthood to one specific set of genitalia is silly.

Photo: Deaconess Angelic Molen embraces a parishioner after her ordination to the diaconate at St. Nektarios Mission Parish near Harare, Zimbabwe. She was ordained by Metropolitan Serafim on Holy Thursday May 2nd after a unanimous vote by the Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria and All Africa to restore the order of deaconess to assist in the needs of Orthodox Christians in Africa.

[a-queer-seminarian]

Hey Avery, I love this blog and the binary-breakers blog. They’ve both been a great help to me as I reconstruct my faith. But I’m struggling with something: my fiancé and I are scheduled to light an advent candle during the Sunday morning service at his church. Initially I was really looking forward to it, but by chance I was curious about how old Mary was when she bore Jesus, and when I looked it up I learned she could have been anywhere from 13-16. Moreover, some traditions put Joseph as being much, much older. It’s just hard not to think in a very . . . sinister direction when considering that context, especially as far as God’s role in this is concerned. What did you learn about this topic in seminary, if anything? Is there any hope that my “problematic” interpretation is unnecessary/invalid?

Hi there! I think it's lovely y'all are going to light an advent candle tomorrow, and I hope it's a meaningful experience! I also totally get your dismay about Mary's age at Jesus's birth.

To start with the facts: yes, Mary was almost certainly a teenager when betrothed to Joseph. The Bible doesn't give any confirmation of her age, but in both ancient Jewish culture and Roman culture, girls were usually married off not too many years after they started menstruating.

When it comes to Joseph's age, I do have some slightly relieving news — he's unlikely to have been the old man he's often depicted as in medieval art. (I actually had a fascinating conversation on this topic with queer Catholic art historian Amy Neville on my podcast that you can read or listen to here!) He almost certainly would have been older than Mary, but it's uncertain how much older.

In ancient Jewish culture, the "ideal" marriage was actually one between a man and a woman who were both in their teens, with an expectation that a man marry by age 20. Being able to support a wife & kids was a key indicator of manhood, so men were expected to get married as young as they could. But in practice, it was more common for men to marry in their late 20s / by age 30, which does mean that their wives would often be a good ten or fifteen years younger than they were.

The Bible doesn't tell us what age Joseph was when he and Mary were betrothed, but it's unlikely he was older than 30, just as it's unlikely she was older than 18.

So maybe that's not quite as discomfiting as the image of a much older Joseph, but by our modern standards, it's still pedophilia. So what do we make of that? And what did God think of that??

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I believe it is an act of faith to be troubled by elements of scripture that should be troubling, rather than shrugging them off as being "God's will" just because they're in the Bible. I highly recommend Rachel Held Evans' book Inspired on this topic, which has a whole chapter on grappling with difficult biblical texts (you can read a long passage from it here).

While exploring our emotions and giving them holy space, it is also important to accept that biblical cultures are two thousand or more years old — the ancient world had completely different understandings of morality from us. That doesn't mean we shrug off displays of sexism or xenophobia in scripture — bigotry is bigotry, whether an ancient iteration or what we have today — but learning about biblical cultures enriches our understanding of why certain things, like slavery or women having little say in whom they marry, are present in the Bible (and often completely taken for granted by its human authors). It can help us distinguish between what is truly God-ordained, versus what the humans writing down their experience of God presume is God-ordained.

I appreciate how womanist theologian Wil Gafney explores the complexity of appreciating the Bible as an ancient human text while looking for Divine truth "between the lines":

“There is liberation in the gospel even though it is sometimes obscured by the structures of power that benefit from holding people captive. There is also a story in and between the lines of and behind the text we hold so dear that points to a liberation that not even the authors and editors of scripture were able to see clearly or, see their way to record.

Jesus was a rabbi, he would have never wanted us to cling to the letters and syntax of these texts as though they were his very body and blood but rather, his spirit and the Spirit of God, blow through them, ruffling and disturbing them and permitting us to read new truths in and out of them and, not lose sight of the ancient stories that are also part of our shared heritage."

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When it comes to Mary's young age when betrothed to Joseph and approached by Gabriel to request her "yes" to carrying God's child, your question of God's "role" in that is a vital one to ask.

In Mary's world, a woman without a kyrios, a man to be her protector, was in a very precarious position. Mary has to be betrothed to someone in her teens. We don't know whether God "approves" of this cultural practice, but we can see how God works within this custom to ensure Mary's security throughout her life:

when Joseph plans to divorce her after she becomes pregnant with Jesus, God sends an angel to persuade him to stick by her;

when Jesus is dying on the cross, he ensures that his beloved will protect Mary after he's gone.

Throughout scripture, God largely seems to operate within a people's cultural expectations (with key exceptions, like how God insists Their people treat foreigners the same as members of the group, or when God warns against giving the people a king just because that's what all the other nations have). That's what I see here. Mary must have a husband to be secure in her culture, and I imagine God ensuring that that husband will be one who will treat her well.

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Then there's the question of God espousing Mary — of the Holy Spirit "overshadowing" her so that she conceives Jesus. What exactly is this "overshadowing" act? Why is God getting a teen girl pregnant?

Again, Rev. Wil Gafney provides words that wrestle out the good news with this complexity. When reading Luke 1, she urges us to sit with our distress at the image of a powerful "male" figure (Gabriel) approaching a teen girl to tell her what's going to happen to her body:

"Sit with me in this moment, this uncomfortable moment, before rushing to find proof of her consent, or argue that contemporary notions of consent do not apply to ancient texts, or God knew she’d say yes so it was prophetic, or contend that (human) gender does not apply to divine beings, Gabriel or God, and the Holy Spirit is feminine anyway. Hold those thoughts and just sit in the moment with this young woman."

Our distress is holy; it shows our connection to a fellow human being, our thirst for justice. Honor what you feel, don't discard your emotions, even while you join them to sociohistorical understanding.

I highly recommend you read Gafney's whole article, but here's a little more from it that balances ancient culture with modern ethics:

"Yet in a world which did not necessarily recognize her sole ownership of her body and did not understand our notions of consent and rape, this very young woman had the dignity, courage, and temerity to question a messenger of the Living God about what would happen to her body before giving her consent. That is important. That gets lost when we rush to her capitulation. Before Mary said, “yes,” she said, “wait a minute, explain this to me.” ... Did the Ever-Blessed Virgin Mary say, “me too?” Perhaps not. A close reading shows her presumably powerless in every way but sufficiently empowered to talk back to the emissary of God, determine for herself, and grant what consent she could no matter the power of the One asking. And yet in that moment after being told by someone else what would happen to her body, she became not just the Mother of God, but the holy sister to those of us who do say, “Me too.” "

Because Mary was a teen girl, an impoverished Palestinian Jew living under empire, she can extend solidarity to people across all time who experience similar oppression, whose bodily autonomy is equally precarious. Just as her son, God in human flesh, extends solidarity to all who have ever been arrested or executed under an unjust state through his crucifixion. Divine power is expressed in and through those whom the world denigrates and discards — that's why God chose Mary, and why Mary in turn chose God.

Sorry this got so long and has a lot of complex stuff to wrestle with. I honor your courage to ask the hard questions, and I hope you are able to take time throughout Advent to keep pondering! There are no easy answers, but wrestling can yield a blessing.